This past Sunday and Monday, more people emailed to their friends and loved ones an op-ed titled “Dogs Are People, Too” than they did any other article in the New York Times. In it, Dr. Gregory Berns, a neuroscientist at Emory University, offers evidence from brain-imaging studies he conducted with dogs to contemplate limited legal personhood “for animals that show neurobiological evidence of positive emotions.”

Image courtesy ALDF Blog.

Many behavioral scientific findings already support the idea that animals experience emotions and are cognitively advanced. Chimpanzees can use tools and learn language, and exhibit complex social relationships. Dogs use human emotional and social cues to learn about the world. Dolphins remember the friends with whom they were in captivity years after they have been separated. Elephants appear to mourn the deaths of other elephants.

MRI technology allows scientists to see which areas of the brain are active while a test subject is awake and reacting to the world. To scan a human brain, a person lies completely still in a scanner for long periods while they listen to sounds or watch a movie. Scientists then observe which brain areas activate. Some participants find the procedure unpleasant—the scanner is loud, and the space is cramped. Dr. Berns has achieved something rare with animals in neuroscience—he has trained dogs to lie completely still in the scanners, with no sedative or invasive procedure necessary, so he can see inside their brains as they process information while awake.

At least one similarity between human and dog brains stands out: they both process positive emotions in the caudate nucleus. This could mean both dogs and humans experience emotions like love and attachment in the same way. If that is the case, he argues, dogs might be cognitively closer to young children than previously thought. Berns suggests that courts should therefore extend greater protections and perhaps even rights to dogs under the law.

Direct comparison of brain activity between humans and dogs is a fantastic step forward for animal welfare research. However, as Adam Gopnik recently pointed out in the New Yorker, merely pinpointing areas of the brain that activate tells us next to nothing about the actual experiences of any individual. Ultimately, it is not surprising that related mammals such as dogs and humans share similar brain structures, used for the same cognitive abilities.

Dr. Berns should be applauded for pioneering new, painless techniques for studying animal neuroscience. However, you don’t need to compare brain parts to discover the complexity of animal emotions or to know that they suffer. Observing the natural behaviors of animals alone should be sufficient to grant animals protection under the law.

1 Comment

Many people call certain dogs that have owned them “heart dogs” or “soul dogs” because they held a special place in their heart. According to this article, perhaps dogs have “heart people” or “soul people” too?